Human ad products

I decided to mix up the days for this newsletter and the format. You’ll now get The Rebooting twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday. The Tuesday email will continue with a new format that is a mix of topics, along with highlights from the podcast. I think this is a better approach than my original podcast-centric approach. But let me know your thoughts: bmorrissey@gmail.com.

Human ad products

Building a good media product is endlessly difficult, particularly when it comes to advertising. Math gives way to physics when ad products are built, as the complexities get ramped up, trying to satisfy financial goals, performance, audience needs, the overall brand mission, not to mention the challenge of balancing unique ad products with repeatable (and high-margin) ad products. Too often, that’s resulted in an adversarial approach to monetization that seems to operate in a parallel universe to the the stated ethos of the brand. If you’re going to claim to be high end, it’s hard to then turn to bottom-of-the-barrel monetization methods.

The shift to primary-engagement media is an opportunity to rethink monetization products. The success of newsletters and podcasts ad products has mostly been due to ignoring the typical monetization methods of other digital media. Running banner ads in email newsletters doesn’t work as well as hand-crafted ads in the voice of the publication, particularly if delivered by an individual. The same holds true for a personal publishing medium like podcasting, which has long relied on host reads. These are more human ad products, playing into the “casualness” that’s eating the world.

Litquidity, which is aiming to more than triple the $1 million in revenue it reached last year, has rolled out an interesting new product in which it will co-host earnings calls for companies on Twitter spaces. Litquidity began as a popular finance meme account, and has since expanded into a daily email newsletter with more than 120,000 subscribers, a podcast, mech operation and investment portfolio. Litquidity has signed up RCI Hospitality, operator of dozens of nightclubs and  strip clubs, to host RCI’s investor call on Twitter Spaces. For RCI, this is an opportunity to reach a new class of retail investor and younger finance pros who aren’t the type to dial into the normally dull investor calls where analysts love to repeat “great quarter, guys.”

Brian Hanly, CEO of Bullish Studio, which works with Litquidity on growth and monetization,  estimated investor relations to be a $1 billion-$3 billion market, with 4,200 public companies spending on average $800,000 on IR. Those budgets are an attractive target, particularly for smaller public companies that do not generate the equity analyst coverage of more high profile companies. RJI, for instance, has just three equity analysts covering it.

“Their last earnings call had 100 people,” said Mark Moran, head of growth at Litquidity who will host the RJI call. “One of my tweets about this [program] reached 200,000. We can confidently say we’ll get more than 100 people.”

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